


Do I have to tell the story?

by Chiomi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Community: tw_holidays, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Lab Tech Stiles, M/M, POV Derek Hale, Police Officer Derek Hale, Stiles Uses A Baseball Bat, Vigilantism, cops acting extrajudicially, everyone is cops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 11:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2691785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I just think it’s biased coverage - they’re both vigilantes, they’re both breaking the law. Why does the Wolfman get called a hero and the Batter a menace?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do I have to tell the story?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crashinmyimagination](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crashinmyimagination/gifts).



> This contains police officers acting extrajudicially, which is, uh, poorly timed, to say the least.
> 
> Thanks to the usual suspects for the beta.
> 
> I tried to include both superheroes and people underestimating Stiles.
> 
> Title is from 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' by The Police.

“I just think it’s biased coverage - they’re both vigilantes, they’re both breaking the law. Why does the Wolfman get called a hero and the Batter a menace?”

Derek hates that the forensic tech is apparently obsessed with Wolfman and the Batter. He’s planted in the middle of the police station, and he keeps going on about the guys who think they can do a better job. Derek slams down the evidence bin maybe a little too hard. Stiles and the ME both jump. “Don’t you have backlog to be working on?”

“Chill, Officer Tightshirt. The fingerprints from that Amber Alert prep thing at the school are scanning, I’m running the stomach contents from that body on Sixth for Lydia, I’m updating the computer, and I haven’t even had my first coffee yet.”

Derek grunts, and leaves. He knows he shouldn’t take it out on Stiles, who’s both inclined to horrifying pranks and not actually at fault for his bad mood. But it’s frustrating. The Batter might get called a menace, but he’s on the streets a lot more than Derek can manage and still get six hours of sleep a night and do his job. He’s making more of a difference than Derek is, and he doesn’t even have any superpowers.

Boyd’s waiting for him in the bullpen, going over some of his paperwork from the punk kid drug pusher whose stash they’d just confiscated. “Ready to head back out?

Derek nods, and they go back out on patrol.

-

Derek patrols after his shift, too, half-shifted and with his mask in place. He’d overheard Reyes talking about a domestic earlier that the battered spouse refused to even admit was a problem. Calls like that always wind Reyes up -- wind everyone up, really. They’re why Derek started doing his off-books patrols. As a cop he gets to do good, but his purview is limited.

That’s what the mask is for. Derek gets to clean up all the petty villainies in the city, and gets to let loose with his abilities that are more than human. He tracks down the woman who’s been beating her wife by a combination of the neighborhood Reyes was patrolling and the scent that had lingered on her uniform. He presses her up against a wall and dislocates the shoulder of her dominant hand, the one with the bruised knuckles. “Only dirtbags beat up on their loved ones,” he growls, voice low as it can go without cracking. He’s not recognizable by sight, and he’d smell another werewolf and just disappear: the voice thing just rounds out the disguise.

The woman’s crying, snarling out threats to beat the shit out of him. Derek fades into the shadows, and is halfway down the block by the time she looks around.

It’s satisfying, to have done some good.

He climbs a building’s fire escape to run along the rooftops. He’s less visible this way, and gets to make dramatic entrances. He heads down to the industrial district, where after dark he can smell cooling metal and malice. They’ve been hearing things at the station about new dealers in town, and the industrial district is a good place to start the search for the rat’s nest. It’s where a lot of guys set up, because the cannery closes at night and most of the warehouses aren’t staffed.

When he started going out as the Wolfman, Derek had somehow assumed that beating the shit out of the small-time guys in Beacon Hills would reduce drug trafficking. As cops they can’t always even get enough evidence for an arrest, but Derek can smell what someone’s been up to and mete out punishment without all the procedure. His assumption that those individual cleanup jobs would clean up the streets had been wrong, though. He doesn’t think he’s ever been so wrong about anything in his life: the small-time guys’ bosses had come in, and other groups that thought they could fill the brand new gap. Now he’s just taking them out in hopes that eventually word will get out.

One of the smaller warehouses has cracks of suspicious light around the doors. The predictability really is convenient. Derek pauses on the roof of the warehouse next to it, both because it’s the best vantage and because people always hear when you land on their roofs. He’d learned kind of painfully a few months ago. At least they’d only been regular bullets. Now he stretches his senses, counts people by their movements and tries to smell if there’s any wolfsbane or saltpeter in the building. His heartbeat slows and fades out of his awareness as Derek breathes deep and slow. He inhales gasoline and garbage, identifies those and the other scents of the area so he can rule them irrelevant. From the warehouse he smells a lot of gunpowder, half a dozen strangers, but also something familiar - or rather someone.

Stiles. Stilinski the fucking lab tech is in the building with what are probably gun-runners, given that Derek can’t smell any familiar drug on the breeze. Derek had always thought Stiles was cute and harmless, way more suited to the lab than the streets. It makes him feel a little sick, now. No wonder they have an ever-escalating fucking crime problem, if they’ve got a dirty cop handling the evidence that leads to prosecution.

This is why Derek’s brand of justice is more reliable. Enraged and feeling kind of betrayed, he drops from the roof and lands silently in the alley, then eases open the closest door. It had been locked, but not deadbolted, which meant that a short, sharp jerk with werewolf strength - well, it gave up too quickly to make much noise. The door opened to a corridor, office on one side and bathroom on the other, neither occupied. He can hear voices ahead of him, and is close enough that they resolve into individuals - mostly one individual, voice made inhuman by either strange acoustics or some kind of modulator.

Derek ghosts into the main room of the warehouse, a cavernous shell stacked high with boxes. These can’t all be weapons, he thinks, panicked. The department would have noticed this kind of traffic coming in. The city would be a madhouse.

But - no, these don’t smell like metal. They smell like polyester, mostly. He notices, too, that there are a few crates in the middle of the warehouse. They’re distinctly separate from the rest of the warehouse, and they have non-English shipping stamps. Those have to be the guns, and that makes the whole thing manageable. Not more than ten crates, surrounded by a loose circle of human rats, all of whom are staring at the Batter. He’s the one running his mouth, a bloodied man at his feet and bat in hand. The odds are probably close to even with him here.

The Batter sounds like he’s been going for a while, rambling comfortably in a robotic voice at odds with his cadence. “I could do this all night, you know. Just line up, lemme take out my frustrations. I’ve got a lot of frustrations right now, what with my crush at work snapping at me. C’mon, kids, you came to Beacon Hills to party.”

Derek sees his opening and looms out of the darkness. He’s never worked with the Batter before, never even seen him in action, but it’s the perfect setup. “And we know how to party,” he says, and elbows the man to his right sharply in the temple. The man drops, concussed and unconscious but not dead. Pandemonium breaks out, and Derek has another three non-fatally out of commission before anyone manages to shoot him. It’s just a glancing shot, but he roars in response. He hates getting shot, even when it heals almost instantly.

The reactionary pause lets him confiscate the shooter’s gun and break it and throw it at two more of the rats. It distracts them from shooting at him. He throws their comrade at them, too, and the three of them land in a heap. He glances around at the last two, but they’re down, bat-shaped bruises rising on their skin. This is why he gets called a menace: the damage he does is so much more visible than Derek’s.

Derek advances on the last ones left conscious, taking zip ties out of his pants pocket. “You should’ve stayed out of our city,” he growls.

They submit to getting tied up without a fuss, then the Batter says, “We should get going, Wolfman. BHPD is four minutes out.”

Derek grunts an affirmative, but doesn’t go yet. The Batter hesitates at one of the other doors, then leaves. Derek checks the faces of the people he hadn’t taken out himself, looking for the dirty lab tech. He’s not there.

The scent of Stiles is already starting to go stale in the warehouse, fading like he’s gone.

Huh.

-

Derek sleeps on the situation, because letting Stiles know he knows would mean also spilling the beans about being a werewolf. He could maybe pass the face off as a makeup job, but Stiles saw him get shot, and it’s kind of common knowledge that the Wolfman isn’t particularly standard for a human. The paper’s run multiple eyewitness accounts of speed and strength and claws, enough that the rumor mill just keeps going on its own.

In the morning he goes in to the station and feigns surprise at the buzz. Everyone likes a spate of neat arrests, even if they’re vigilante-aided. He’s got a few minutes before his shift, so he sort of vaguely wanders down to the crime lab, only to find Stiles frazzled and putting on his jacket. “Oh, hey, Hale, sorry, can whatever wait? There was a thing last night, and we’ve got a blood sample we know is the Wolfman’s, and that’s priority over everything - though God knows the DA won’t prosecute - and I have to go collect another sample because this one doesn’t even look human. And after _that_ , I get to process evidence for the actual perps, even though we’ve got the whole thing on camera.”

Stiles snaps his newly-packed field kit closed and raises an eyebrow.

Derek closes the lab door behind him and says, “Yeah, that’s what I needed to talk to you about.” He takes a deep breath to pause and center himself. The scents of the room also offer confirmation that he wasn’t wrong last night. His pulse is racing, but he really, really wants to do this. He breathes out. “It’s not - uh. It’s not a problem with the sample. It won’t match human blood.”

Rolling his eyes so hard his whole head moves, Stiles starts, “Oh my God, are you one of those people -”

“It will match mine,” Derek interrupts, keeping his face carefully neutral.

Stiles narrows his eyes at him for two long beats, then points accusingly. “I knew it. No human could produce such perfectly sculpted stubble.”

Derek raises his eyebrows.

“Shut up,” Stiles says, and starts unbuttoning his coat. “So you’re here to, what, turn yourself in?” He looks up through his lashes.

Derek shrugs. “I was thinking I’d ask you to work with me as the Batter, actually.”

Stiles’ eyes go sharp, and track over Derek’s face for a moment even as his heartbeat goes wild. “Okay.”

Riding on success and the prospect of someone to spend time with whom he doesn’t he have to lie to, Derek continues, “And also if you wanted to get dinner with me tonight.”

Stiles smiles slow. “I think I’d like that.”


End file.
